Amid concerns about staffing and rising workloads, increasing efficiency and productivity are top of mind for in-house legal leaders and their teams:

• In the 2024 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey, 40 percent of of CLOs ranked operational efficiency as their law department’s top strategic initiative for the year.
• 58 percent of respondents to The 2024 In-House Legal Technology Report cited increased efficiency and productivity of the team as their top goal.
• 77 percent of respondents to The 2024 In-House Legal Technology Report believe that time spent on manual daily activities takes time and effort away from working on larger business goals.

In spite of these statistics, many legal teams still manually manage their legal invoice approval workflows – and it’s an extremely inefficient process. In fact, 62 percent of respondents to The 2024 In-House Legal Technology Report spend one or more hours per day manually managing invoices, approvals, and spend reporting, while 32 percent spend more than three hours per day on these tasks.

But here’s the good news – in-house teams who use spend management and e-billing solutions in the LawVu legal workspace can now leverage enhanced invoice approval automation to save valuable time and significantly improve legal operations.

The end of manual invoice approvals

Replacing manual administrative work with automated approval workflows delivers significant value to legal teams and their businesses:

• Saving just two hours a week of an attorney’s time is worth more than $11,000 USD per year.
• Every hour saved is time that can be spent on higher value legal and strategic work – leading to positive commercial outcomes and critical risk mitigation.
• This allows legal teams to scale their service, managing increasing volumes of work and invoice review without compromising on efficiency.
• Timely payment of invoices can help teams avoid late payment penalties and take advantage of early pay discounts.
• Faster, more efficient invoice approval workflows give legal teams more accurate and timely data that they can use to make decisions, optimize costs, and plan for resource allocation.

Flexible, easy to use automated invoice workflows

Legal teams need to adhere to departmental and organizational policies, and legal matters and invoices can be highly sensitive and involve multiple internal parties. Teams need the flexibility to seamlessly handle both standard and more ad-hoc, complex workflows – without having to worry about security or invest excessive time and resources into complicated technology.

LawVu’s enhanced automation streamlines every step of the invoice approval process. With simple, easy to use features and an intuitive user interface, invoice approvals are a breeze for every user involved.

Key features

LawVu’s new automated invoice approval features include:

• A simple drag and drop workflow builder that you can use to create an unlimited number of workflows. Workflows progress an invoice through phases, sending the invoice to individual approvers or teams sequentially based on matter types, invoice amounts or other conditions.
• Notifications (both in-app and via email) for approvers, including all the context needed to review, approve and decline invoices without clicking between screens or systems.
• The ability for reviewers to easily add notes to create more context, as well as to add approvers on an ad-hoc basis.
• Automated notifications to legal service providers and outside counsel when invoices are declined (including the reason) and automatic notifications when invoices are approved.
• The ability to quickly view the status and full history of approvals for each invoice.
• The ability to automatically send approved invoices to accounts payable or other departments or people –including an option to send approved invoices to different recipients based on conditions such as region.

Efficiency gains are just the start

Busy legal teams gain tremendous value from automating low-value tasks – simply removing the overhead of sending emails and micromanaging routing processes removes bottlenecks and saves valuable time. But the benefits of automating invoice approval workflows extend far beyond efficiency. Additional advantages include:

• Better compliance: more reliable adherence to internal processes, such as DFA, with automatic tracking and auditing.
• Enhanced visibility: easy to understand invoice status and history supports business continuity and faster information retrieval.
• More bandwidth: with less admin work on their plate, reviewers have greater capacity to focus on critically analyzing spend, which can reduce costly errors and overpayment.
• Improved collaboration: improved working relationships, both internally and with LSPs.
• Enhanced data security: move away from the high-risk practice of managing invoice approval workflows through email by using a centralized, encrypted platform – reducing the likelihood of a breach or accidental data sharing.

How to get started with automated invoice approval workflows

If you’re a LawVu customer and are currently utilizing our spend management and e-billing features, simply reach out to your LawVu representative or use the 24/7 support chat feature for a demo – as well as access to everything you need to learn about these new features and get started.

If you’re not currently using LawVu’s spend management and e-billing capabilities, request a demo now to discover how the LawVu legal workspace could save your team valuable time and effort, generating the data and analytics you need to communicate value and control costs.

You can learn more about LawVu spend management and e-billing here.